GOOD NEWS, I RESOLVED THE ISSUE!
So we were investigating it together with Technical Advisor Sareem and Specialist Nicky from EA support team and eventually I found a solution and it was so well hidden as well.
At some point I decided to use my notebook to check if it would be a workaround. The only reason I though about it because my PC uses i5-3570k, which is a 3rd gen Intel CPU and the oldest in the recommended settings is a 4th gen one. But it has 4 threads, so it should not be an issue. The notebook is an recent MSI Leopard Pro one that has 6th gen CPU and GTX 1060. Origin was never installed on it.
So I booted it up and installed the application from here: https://www.origin.com/irl/en-us/store/download
What I immediately noticed is that the UI was completely different. So I told Sareem about it and he was rather surprised. Apparently my PC version of Origin was severely outdated. I tried to find any way to force it to update but I could not find any.
PC - 9.12.0.34172
Notebook - 10.5.5.6040
So I let the notebook to finish downloading and installing and launched the game. It worked. Hopes went up... "Could it really be the Origin application itself" I thought and told Sareem.
Since there was no way to actually update my outdated PC version of Origin, I had to fully uninstall it, download it from website and install the V10 version.
And it WORKED. It resolved the issue and the game launched and played fine. Therefore if any of your are still having this issue or new people find it, do this:
1. Uninstall your current Origin application from Control Panel
2. Download Origin from https://www.origin.com/irl/en-us/store/download
3. Install Origin and launch NFS Payback
PS! You do not have to uninstall the game when you uninstall Origin.
Thank you again EA Support team for your efforts!
